For me, this is not the noteworthy observation in this chart. It is that the “Other” group charted here is only 0.02% or lesser of marketshare / usage!

And this is particularly interesting when you consider that there has been a continuous stream of well-funded search engine companies that have come into the market over time. Take the well funded and much-hyped Cuil or the recently launched Blekko. Or the veteran meta search engine DogPile. Or the clustering search engine Clusty. Or niche search engines like the discussion search engine Omgili, or the people search engine Pipl, or the real-time search engine Topsy. There are literally over one hundred such search engines in existence now, not to mention the many that have come and gone!

The combined effect of all the $s gone into these companies, their creativity, their innovations, as measured by their actual impact on the market is but a small, unnoticeable blip.

The dominance of Google, with Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask picking up the rear to complete the canvas of “mainstream search engines”, seems to leave no room whatsoever for innovations from outside to thrive!

One could argue that none of the hundreds of search engine companies in the past decade offered a compelling enough alternative to Google. Clearly that is true at many levels. The sheer coverage of the Web that Google provides, the high performance sub-second result pages, the continuous stream of small innovations (like Wonder Wheel, Query Autosuggestions, Google Instant etc.) continue to keep a high bar that not even the others in the “mainstream search engines” have been able to match and exceed consistently.

On the other hand, Google isn’t without flaws, holes and deficiencies. As recentarticles point out well, Google’s search results are manipulated every single minute. What yielded superior results consistently back in 1999-2001 has consistently been compromised in the past 8-9 years, especially for queries with a commercial intent. Relevance, the thing that Google was originally most famous for, is slipping away from Google, or so it seems at this juncture. This, and other factors like, the growth of social media, social networking, real-time information, video and more, have made the search engine problem more complex. In this complexity, and these gaps, search engine startups see opportunities, and investors continue to invest money.

But will any of these search engine startups and their innovations really become part of the mainstream in terms of user adoption?

It does seem like a tall order. The graph above speaks volumes about the rather poor odds of a new search engine become part of the mainstream! It is in this vein that I wonder if Google’s domination, followed by the four other “mainstream search engines”, stifles lasting search engine innovation from a broader market of search engine companies! What do you think?

I have a vested interest in this matter. My second startup, Zakta, is about to release a new search engine to market soon. I’ll be writing more about this here in the coming days and weeks.